What’s your role within the MISTRAL project?
My name is Daniel Murray and I am the scientific lead for work package 4 – gut microbiome correlates of severe AIDS and non-AIDS events.
What’s the primary goal of the work package you lead?
The background of our work package is the fact that people with HIV have elevated risk of both serious AIDS and non-AIDS events, such as cardiovascular disease, compared to the general population. One hypothesis is that factors associated with the gut microbiome contribute to this elevated risk. However, to better understand this we need large multinational studies that collect data on the gut microbiome as well as other clinical and environmental factors. This type of research is crucial for understanding whether the microbiome is associated with clinical events. Therefore, in our work package, together with our clinical sites across the established EuroSIDA Clinical Network, we’ll be collecting both stool and blood from over thousand participants with HIV and then performing statistical analysis to determine whether factors associated with the gut microbiome can predict downstream clinical events, with the particular focus on cardiovascular disease.
Which are the latest results you have achieved?
We are still in the recruitment phase of our work package and have recruited over 600 participants. It’s an amazing achievement and we are eternally grateful to our collaborating sites across the EuroSIDA network and, of course, to the participants themselves; you generously contribute both your valuable time and crucial clinical samples to this project. We are now beginning to analyse the collected clinical samples using state of the art molecular techniques and hope to be able to release the results of these analysis later in the year.
